Making the news available at no cost is a victory

https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2026/05/12/just-days-tribune-reporting/

48•danso•1h ago

Comments

superxpro12•49m ago

The "Free News" model is certainly something I've struggled to solve. How exactly can you provide impartial, objective reporting when you cant afford the salaries?

If the people arent interested in paying... what else can you do?

mcmcmc•41m ago

If people don’t want to pay, then they don’t actually value the news. I pay for publications that I trust and want to continue reading.

The key is finding a niche where the news organization can produce quality reporting that people actually value. “Free News” is just another ad business.

troupo•27m ago

Significantly fewer people would pay for objective reporting than for, say, Fox News.

Partly because Fox News would be much cheaper.

kanelincoln•14m ago

Do you think that the desire to pay for a thing is the only indicator of whether that thing is valued? If not, what do you mean by "[people] don't actually value the news"?

idle_zealot•29m ago

There's an even more fundamental problem: even if you can pay the salaries, how do you ensure that your organization remains aligned with the original goal? How do you prevent it from being subtly influenced by the confluence of interests it will be exposed to by virtue of wielding influence? How do you defend against less than subtle interests?

Note that charging for the news does not defend you against this.

afavour•13m ago

I see that as more of an ecosystem problem. In a world where multiple news organizations have cracked the nut of providing free news you rely on different outlets providing different perspectives. I'm not sure it's possible to make a news organization have absolutely no bias at all.

idle_zealot•5m ago

I'm not convinced it's even conceivable in the abstract to have a news organization with "no bias." You have to make editorial decisions based on something. If you make then based on what you think your readers ought to know, your ideology, values, and understanding of the world inform those decisions and comprise your bias. An objective news outlet would be... what? A live feed of every square inch of the planet provided with no commentary?

What we should demand is not unbiased reporting, but transparency in editorial decision making and proactive disclosure of potential conflicts of interest.

autoexec•9m ago

I think it'd be a good start to have stories selected and reviewed by a diverse team of editors and fact checkers to make sure that the reporting is factual and that it isn't presented from a limited and biased perspective. You'd also have to be willing/able to burn bridges and risk losing advertisers, donors, viewers/readers, and supporters by reporting on things that offend those same people. That alone would be a huge improvement to most news sources I see today which outright lie and/or are biased in which stories they report on and how they report on them.

conception•14m ago

It’s unfortunate we haven’t solved the micro-payment problem. Crypto was an obvious solution but anything would require a hefty network effect. But imagine like a starbucks card or whatever you have your micropayment card, and it auto reloads when it hits zero with 20 bucks or whatever. When you visit the times, a modal pops up, “This article costs $0.02. Read it? y/n or $1 for a day pass”. Sure pirates will get around it but they already do. Just make it grandma easy and you’re done. It’s just the money probably isn’t good enough for VC dollars to roll something out with enough big players to jump in.

afavour•8m ago

That model doesn't really work, unfortunately:

https://www.amediaoperator.com/newsletter/microtransactions-...

It has been tried a bunch of times. I think a core problem is unlike most micro transaction opportunities you're asking customers to pay money to be told bad news. To buy something that will make them miserable. There's a fundamental disconnect there that means people aren't going to be inclined to do it.

andriy_koval•8m ago

> How exactly can you provide impartial, objective reporting when you cant afford the salaries?

you provide free service, build brand and ecosystem, and charge for extra services, e.g. automatic-monitoring specific news topic, analytics, faster delivery on scale, etc. and even ads/ads free accounts

romanows•6m ago

NPR/public radio has been doing a decent job without much obtrusive third-party advertising.

cathyreisenwitz•49m ago

Making newsrooms beholden to donors is not ideal, but it's better than being beholden to advertisers.

dpoloncsak•30m ago

...is there a difference? The donors tend to have just as much of an agenda to push

rightbyte•25m ago

I think the point is that the donors should have an another political agenda than the political agenda of whatever companies that pays for ads.

dpoloncsak•6m ago

The donors are just going to be the figureheads of these companies, right? That's already how it tends to work...

Tesla/SpaceX didn't donate to Trump's campaign, Musk did. It wasn't Palantir, it was Peter Thiel. (to my knowledge but I honestly didn't check the dono rolls, just going off remembering headlines here)

Either way, the outcome is basically the same. If they ban companies donating, CEOs will donate with a wink wink, as the cost of the donation is peanuts to the profit they'll make. These aren't your standard donations for tax-writeoffs (though I'm sure it helps, too), these are purchases of influence

moralestapia•24m ago

It might also be the case that one single "donor" puts in like 60% of the budget.

But that is also no different from one single client being 60% of your revenue.

In both cases, they'll be calling some shots.

kgwxd•29m ago

"beholden to donors" is a nonsensical phrase, unless "donors" is defined with a wink, a nod, and air-quotes.

flexagoon•21m ago

I think I have a pretty good guess of who the donors are for a newspaper in Salt Lake City

grahamburger•9m ago

The Salt Lake Tribune has always promoted the view of the opposition for Salt Lake City (and Utah). It might not be who you think.

fragmede•17m ago

Why is being beholden to advertisers who just want to make a buck better than donors with specific political goals to change and shape society how they want it to look. (Eg anti-abortion movements.)

wrqvrwvq•14m ago

Discussion of the free-press in america or elsewhere invariably suffers from lack of historical perspective. Without oversimplifying, the press has always been biased and ideologically motivated to a degree that few appreciate. Because of "all the president's men" and other films lionizing the press' infallible, dogged, ruthless dedication to the truth, people suddenly believe that every journalist is "supposed to be" a paragon of truth-seeking objectivity, dogmatically devoted to the dissemination of "truth to power", but historically and today and even during watergate, the press was a gang of jackals doing yellow muckraking. This has its purpose and we shouldn't hate journalists for doing their job, but it's a complete category error to assume that the press is there to report honestly and objectively.

clickety_clack•12m ago

Why? It’s not clear to me that the motives of a small group of people paying to control the news that I see are better than the motives of a variety of companies trying to get me to buy razor blades and Jeeps. At least in the latter case I know that “big razor” cares about selling razor blades. Who knows what big donors are trying to get me to think.

adolph•23m ago

This appears to be "free as in beer" in that they do not mention any changes to intellectual property considerations.

  In 2019, The Tribune became the first legacy publication to transition to a 
  nonprofit. This move changed our calculus. We are now an independent news 
  organization, not owned by any person or company.

The change to corporate structure is probably more significant than removing pay to read. If they can attract a big and broad enough donor base of civic associations etc then they will be well insulated from the vicissitudes of quasi-ad "underwriting."

droolboy•14m ago

As a Canadian with "free news" it's not great. You get media outlets that almost never criticize the government for fear of getting defunded. We saw this with the lack of coverage on major bills just yesterday.

iron_albatross•10m ago

How does this happen in practice? Wouldn’t the privately funded news companies still cover the story? Or are all the news companies publicly funded?

locusofself•7m ago

Not to be a cynic, but it doesn't seem to explicitly state if there will be advertisements.

grahamburger•4m ago

There always have been and will continue to be. The site is not hostile to adblockers, though.